What is SEO?
Have you ever seen the term “SEO” appear on your social media feed and wondered what it means?
As a self-proclaimed social media guru whose only relevant experience is the number of hours spent on TikTok learning viral dances or on Instagram scrolling through Instastories, here is my short take on “SEO”, also known as “Search Engine Optimisation”.
SEO is the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic to your brand through non-paid (i.e. organic) search engine results. To limit our understanding of SEO to only search engines themselves is unhelpful. It is about understanding the needs of your target audience and what they are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, and the content they want to read. Hence, it is important to understand both hardware (i.e. search engines) and software (i.e. target audience). As most businesses have migrated to the digital landscape, SEO knowledge is pivotal in ensuring the longevity of a business.
Search engines, like Google and Bing, are essentially a library of all existing web content. When a query is made, these powerful engines will scour the world wide web to determine which content is most relevant to the query. Search engines do this by cataloguing all available internet content through a process known as “crawling and indexing” and then “ranking” it to ensure the most relevant content matches the person’s query. While paid advertising can help generate traffic to your brand’s website, most online traffic is primarily driven by search engines. In fact, organic search results may appear more credible to the ordinary searcher and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements.
Core functions of SEO
Crawling, Indexing and Ranking are the three key functions of a search engine that everyone needs to know about. Crawling refers to the discovery process by which search engines find new and updated content. Upon fetching a few web pages, the crawlers follow the links to find new URLs. Indexing is the process of storing and organising the content found during the crawling stage in a huge database. Finally, ranking is the process by which search results are ordered by relevance. The higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes that the site is most relevant to the query.
Crawling
A search engine should typically capture all the available content on your website and not just the homepage to ensure visibility and reach. There are, however, some barriers that prevent crawlers from retrieving the content data. One such barrier is login forms. Search engines cannot see those protected pages if the page requires users to log in and fill out forms before accessing certain content. Another important thing to take note of is your site’s navigation. To ensure your content gets listed in search results, the crawler needs to follow a path of links on the website to guide it from page to page.
Indexing
After a crawler finds a page, the search engine will analyse the page’s contents and store all of that information in its index. If you want to know if a Googlebot crawler has seen your pages, one quick way is to look at the cached version of your page. It will generally reflect the last time the bot has crawled it. There have been instances where pages can be removed from the index, thereby rendering it invisible from the search engine. For example, password-locking a page blocks the URL from being crawled. Learning the various reasons will help businesses ensure that their page’s contents are listed in the index.
Ranking
Search engines use algorithms to order the stored information in meaningful ways. A page will rank based on how well its content matches the query. It has been said that the algorithm typically looks at three variables: links to the website, on-page content and RankBrain (RankBrain is the machine learning component of Google’s core algorithm).
To achieve optimal SEO, you should include strategic keywords relevant to your target audience in your website’s content. Market research can help you analyse the keywords people are searching for or the total number of people searching a particular query. This will help your site during the crawling and ranking stage.
Hopefully, the above provides a summary of what SEO means and why it matters. If you are interested to learn more about SEO, head on over to this helpful guide at Moz.
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